[OPEN] The end of the storm

[watermemory]

Who ⬤ The team members and ANYONE!
What ⬤ The mission was a success! Time to face the music from friends and family.
When ⬤ Just after the tower expedition
Where ⬤ Outside Kaigo no Bou, probably moving around
Content Warnings ⬤ References to violence and horror imagery


All at once, the rains cease.

The damage remains, both to the city and to her inhabitants, but reality reasserts itself, and the ill wind that's blown through Jigoku-cho has—for now—come to an end.

Emergency services have borne away the injured, including the Daitengu and the freed Enma, leaving a gaggle of people emerging into the night.


[This is an OPEN IC MINGLE. Go forth and icly rubberneck or speculate or collect your friends back home to get some rest or yell at said friends for taking risks without telling them they were chosen for this mission out of some misguided attempt to get them to not worry. Who would do something so stupid, anyway.]

Comments

look,

[watermemory]

[Despite everything, he smiles a little, partly warmed at the words and partly in relief; it's a motion that Tama would probably feel rather than see.] Nobody asked me to go out the window or play with wooden swords at the top of the stairs... If that's "fate", it's fate made of choices we'd have made anyway, isn't it? Even when it's little things like that.

I said I wouldn't ask you about-- [He's about to say "the shopkeeper," but he's still haunted by the glimpse of that man's face in one of the monsters, when he'd been forced to draw steel on it. Even if it was only a nightmare -- if it had spoken in the same voice Minakami heard down the telephone, he thinks he'd have done worse than freeze.] --about the future, when it hurt you to think of it. But... if you believe me... when you're ready, I'm here to listen.

[He's still skittish about talking about the past, to be honest -- it feels like it's gone wrong more than right, the closer they've gotten to the present day. Some equation that's gone unbalanced somehow. It'd be too cut and dried to say that was why he'd given up on the idea -- but it'd be lying if he said that didn't factor. Still. He's glad he didn't, in the end.]

...me too. [He tilts his head sideways, gently butting Tama's head with his.] ...come on. Let's go home before the sun rises.